The setting is a brownstone tenement on new York‘s Lower East Side during two sweltering summer days in 1947. Amid the perspiration and poverty, dustbins and graffiti, neighbourliness thrives fuelled by endless gossip, presented us with several loosely connected sketches of immigrant life.

As these merge, the story focuses on the Marrant family. Frank, a stagehand is a hard man and a drinker, stern with his family. Anna, his long suffering wife yearns for affection and a little happiness. She finds what she needs in Sankey, the collector for the milk company. Rose, their daughter is in love with Sam Kaplan, a bespectacled Jewish law student who finds in his books an escape from the squalor of his environment, and is even willing to give up a promising career to take Rose to a better place.

Among their neighbours on the block is Laura Hilderbrand, who, abandoned by her husband and, unable to pay the rent, is to be evicted. When the threat of violence turns to reality, the tragedy that ensues shatters everyone’s lives forever.

Adapted from Elmer Rice's 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, with lyrics by Langston Hughes, this emotionally affecting show is nevertheless weakened by the episodic structure of the storytelling, and the effusive playing by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Keith Lockhart and a total of 80 singers who, although impressive, tend to drown at times the spoken dialogue.